Slip Zoe Lister-Jones

Slip Review: Zoe Lister-Jones’ Rom-Com Multiverse is a Liberating Watch

The life-changing and universe-bending powers of orgasm.

As a general rule, women hate repetitiveness. Men can live the same monotonous cycle (work, relax, sleep) and be fulfilled for years if not decades, but women often need excitement and freshness; otherwise, they become unhappy. This can be especially true when it comes to relationships. Zoe Lister-Jones’ seven-part series Slip explores this idea in-depth by introducing a rom-com multiverse that likely all of us have fantasized about at least once. What if you could live in parallel universes and be a different person with various romantic partners and lifestyles that all explore an individual version of you? Would you be content? Would you enjoy slipping into an alternate personality? Or would you miss the same boring and unsurprising yet secure life you wishfully tried to get out of?

Slip follows Mae (Zoe Lister-Jones), an associate curator working at a museum, who feels stuck in her marriage, which has become predictable and tedious over the years. The spark is gone, and she and her husband, Elijah (Whitmer Thomas), are getting more disconnected and distant each day. Mae confides these feelings to her best friend Gina (a lively Tymika Tafari) and even says that after a certain amount of time, being married is like being single — you’re just single together. She clearly wants something to change (even if she doesn’t really know what it is).

After a successful exhibition at the museum, Mae goes out to celebrate at a bar across the street with Gina. By chance, she meets Eric (Amar Chadha-Patel), a handsome musician who just got out of a bad relationship. As one drink leads to another, they find themselves in Eric’s apartment hooking up. The following morning, Mae is baffled as she realizes she’s in some kind of parallel universe. Apparently, she’s been married to Eric for years, and the two live together as a couple. It will take some utterly confused and panicky moments until she figures out that her “pussy is a wormhole,” and each time she orgasms, she travels into a different universe and a different life.

Slip takes the viewer on an intriguing journey of self-exploration through its protagonist, and it’s very upfront about its agenda. In every alternate reality Mae travels through, she’s a person driven by her desires. Sexuality is a significant part of that (as it should be), and she gets to live out fantasies she wouldn’t dare to act on in her “original” life. The series is refreshingly open about intimacy, revelling in nudity and sensuality, which feels fluid and pleasingly natural. Yet intimacy doesn’t only entail physical attraction but emotional attachment, too.

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The delicate and personal issues Mae and Elijah have are also present in some form in the other universes. The questions of having kids, pursuing a career, or loving one’s self all have potential answers, but none of them is definitive. At times, it’s a little frustrating that Slip doesn’t delve into fleshing them out more explicitly when the opportunity presents itself so openly. But there are still enough thought-provoking aspects and situations that force us to put ourselves in the protagonist’s shoes and ask, “What would we do?”

Despite each vastly different alternate reality Mae gets to taste, she’s desperately trying to find a way back to the one she knows. The one that’s truly hers. And in spite of the occasional cliché along the way — the typical complications we’re familiar with from similar narratives — the writing deftly and poignantly makes a case for wanting the life back that Mae not long ago deemed tedious and underwhelmingly predictable. Alongside her, we slowly realize the escape (or solution) she longs for isn’t to be in an entirely new life but to view the one she has from a different angle to rediscover something beautiful she’s taken for granted too long. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of why we fell for the person we chose to live the rest of our lives with. And that might require us to take a hard look at ourselves and find the faulty wiring within that prevented us from leading a fulfilling and happy life.

Watching Slip, it’s crystal clear that it was a passion project for Lister-Jones. Being the writer, director, and star of the series, she knows Mae inside out and portrays her with a fragile vulnerability that instantly wins over our sympathy. She’s quirky, sensual, and more importantly, relatable as a person in her late 30s, seeking something she can’t quite put her finger on. We all go through phases like that at one point or another in our lives, and Slip captures that insecurity and existential crisis in a comedic yet profound manner. And in doing so, hopefully, will help us open our eyes and pay attention to the small yet crucial things we might’ve been ignoring for too long.

Slip drops on Roku starting April 21.

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